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About Me

Huh? My story? Okay.

Stop-motion found me by accident. I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, where film has always played a prominent role in my life, and where I honed down my interest to 3D-animation while completing my undergraduate degree at SFSU. It was great, however I always felt a bit distant from the content I was creating and constantly wished I could just reach out and touch the character to get it to move the way I wanted it to move in a more immediate and tangible manner.

Then one night a few years ago I saw a poster for a lecture that stop-motion master Phil Tippett was giving on his career. I went and the night changed my life. I was instantly brought back to the all the films I grew up on and all the images of the ILM model shop guys building the world of Star Wars, and how I thought that was the coolest job in the world.

After that night, I decided to switch tracks and began to eat up everything I could find that was related to stop-motion. I read every stop-motion book I could get my hands on, watched tons of technical how-to stop-motion DVDs, and found every movie that had any kind of notable stop-motion effect in it, from the silent era to Harryhausen to contemporary features, and watched them all. I even convinced Phil to have lunch with me and he generously showed me around his studio. Seeing the legacy of physical models from classic films was pretty awe inspiring unto itself, but then I saw the shop - where the real action takes place, and I knew for sure that the kind of place I wanted to be.

Fast forward a few years and I've learned how to sculpt characters, make molds, machine armatures, cast puppets, build and light sets, and everything in-between. It’s constant problem solving where I learn something new nearly every day and love every minute of it.

Currently I'm directing and animating a stop-motion short film called Creature Feature, which I also wrote and fabricated much of. It's pretty cool, you should check out it's progress on Instagram and here on this site. I mean, I know I would.